Other than the statistics, the other comments in the article give rise to hope.

]]>By: OMhttp://www.debito.org/?p=1712&cpage=1#comment-163542
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:23:03 +0000http://www.debito.org/?p=1712#comment-163542Well, as the famous saying goes, “no smoke rises from where there is no fire.”

–Um, unpack this thought a little more for us…

]]>By: E.P.Lowehttp://www.debito.org/?p=1712&cpage=1#comment-163485
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:48:33 +0000http://www.debito.org/?p=1712#comment-163485And what will happen when the hoo-hah over wrongly-jailed Japanese Citizens dies down? Will we go back down to 0.1%?

Heaven forbid if someone cleared of a crime goes out and commits a serious crime – we could be looking at 0.0000001%.

There’s no solid foundation for this increase in the ‘innocence rate’ – legislation and transparent policing and justices systems are needed.

I believe Japanese lawyers should look at the constitutional system of working democracies such as scandinavian countries or Canada and study what worked and what didn’t and bring the best solutions to their own country.

In Canada it is a general principle that prosecutors are not supposed to seek convictions, but simply bring the facts to the court and let them decide. When a defendent is acquitted, the prosecutor did not “lose” his case, he simply did his job and let the law decide. The Canadian supreme court also laid very strict rules for confessions… for example, when a police officer tells a suspect that if he confesses he’ll get a lighter sentence, that alone is sufficient to make the confession thrown out in court. Also, if the police goes out of bounds to interrogate a suspect, and that suspect, under coercion, tells the police where the crime weapon is, then that weapon cannot be used as evidence (unless it is in a place where the police would have looked anyway, but if it’s buried underground or in a river or something, then it doesn’t matter what the police get from it, it gets thrown out)

The attitude that “you just don’t understand us” whenever a change is proposed is sad, but fortunately not universal.